Comedy

Comedy is one of the most difficult literary forms to write well, and one of the most difficult to teach. A joke has to land in real time; a satirical argument has to sting; a comic novel has to sustain a specific tone across hundreds of pages without wearing out its welcome. The great comic writers are, in some ways, the ones whose craft is easiest to underrate — because when it works, comedy looks effortless.

The Book Renzo comedy shelf features two of the most influential wits in English-language literature.

Oscar Wilde's plays and prose remain funny, more than a century after they were written, in a way most nineteenth-century writing simply is not. The Importance of Being Earnest — Wilde's most famous play, first performed in 1895 — is one of the most tightly constructed comedies of manners in English. Its plot is deliberately absurd; its dialogue is a cascade of paradoxes and epigrams; and beneath the sparkle Wilde is doing something serious — quietly dismantling the assumptions Victorian respectability rested on. Wilde's genius was to make you laugh so hard you didn't notice, until later, that the joke was on the entire moral edifice of the culture he was writing inside.

Mark Twain is the great American humorist of the nineteenth century, and his work occupies a different comic register. Twain's humor is looser than Wilde's, more grounded in observation than in epigrammatic wit, and more willing to punch at power. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, published in 1889, is one of his most ambitious comic novels — a book about a nineteenth-century American engineer who is transported into medieval England and attempts to modernize it. On the surface it is broad comedy. Underneath, it is a serious argument about progress, superstition, and the limits of what technology can actually improve about human nature. Twain's short essays, travel writing, and lectures — Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, and dozens of shorter pieces — remain some of the funniest and most quotable American prose ever written.

Between Wilde's polished English wit and Twain's rangier American humor lie two very different traditions of comic writing, both of which have had enormous influence on everything that followed. We're continuing to expand this shelf. Every book here is a verified public-domain text. Start reading.